'Test City' looks at switch to digital

Thursday

Oct 3, 2013 at 10:37 AM

"Test City: Analog to Digital TV" is a curated international group exhibition

By Justin LacyStarNews Correspondent

At noon on Sept. 8, 2008, Wilmington became the first city in America to undergo the biggest transition in television since black-and-white became color in the 1950s, all with the flip of a cartoonishly oversized light switch labeled "analog to digital." "Test City: Analog to Digital TV" is a curated international group exhibition inspired by Wilmington's foray into digital-only television. The show opens at the Art Gallery at the Cultural Arts Building on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a public reception 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 3.The antiquity of all things analog can be summed up with San Francisco artist Jerimiah Jenkins' "Floppy Disk," a simple sculpture made from two pieces of wood with a hole cut in the middle. Here, the floppy disk appears to be some rustic relic from a bygone era, and for many, it really is."Test City's" sculptures, films, drawings and interactive media play off of changes in the way we view television – and television sets for that matter – to comment on the general evolution of technology and our shifting perspective of it. Jenkins' "Inner Attainment" features a static-y analog television set wrapped in deer hide and sporting antlers for antennas. The piece reminds us of a time when television's boxy analog ancestors were, like a prized, mounted deer head, the standard living-room point of interest as opposed to the slender digital devices now occupying wall space. "I think it's interesting how much (TV) seems to have changed from a very tactile, sculptural object in your house – this giant television set – to these really slim, streamlined screens," said UNCW assistant professor Courtney Johnson.Johnson came up with and curated "Test City," a job that required her to check out some outdated equipment. "One of the artists, Simon Greenberg, has a manipulated VHS tape," Johnson said. "This weekend I went and got a VCR-DVD-analog-TV combo and put in the VHS, and it's just such a strange box. The physical TV box is so giant, and the quality of the image is so different. It's kind of astounding because we're so used to seeing digital, even though it was only a few years ago that it switched."Brooklyn-based artist Phillip Stearns' video graphic and sound compositions feature colorful, distorted images reminiscent of poor analog reception from the days of yore.

In his "Machines for Making Nothing" series, Samson Young, an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong, presents tiny electronic objects no bigger than a pack of cards. Viewers can interact with the touch-screen devices, which respond with, according to the artist's website, "almost hypnotic visual feedback" with no utilitarian purpose. "Interactivity is seductive," Young writes on his website. "As a label it is endowed with the magical power to transform ordinary appliances and bad art into potent objects of desire." Young's interactivity element calls to mind the increased level of control we have in consuming our digital media."It seems like most of the media we get is either through the computer or through digital TV," Johnson said, "but we are more active participants in it because we can select what we're watching. I have a Roku, and you have to actively select what show you're going to watch or what movie you're going to watch, whereas before it was kind of streaming in through your television and you could change the channel. It wasn't so active." Although some rabbit-ear adjusting residents were affected by Wilmington's transition on Sept. 8, 2008, the majority already had cable, and, as the numerous public service announcements advised, didn't need to worry about the switch. It wasn't much of a change for most of us. But "Test City" highlights the symbolism behind the day broadcasters shut off their analog signals as a monumental moment in technology's constant, don't-look-back procession.

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